I don’t know if that’s good honestly. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I think the simplicity of the earlier game was part of the appeal. Try playing it now. There’s so much stuff that I don’t know what is happening half the time. I’ll play it a bit every few years with friends, but every time it feels like they’ve taken things too far. Is anyone actually asking for more content?
It’s simpler in different ways. Understanding how to play the game is easier now, and modding is a cake walk compared to what it used to be (I wrote a mod for repairing equipment that got popular, which is almost identical to what they ended up implementing), especially adding custom blocks.
Understanding what to do is a lot harder. The dangerous stuff I caves that you can’t run near or whatever, for example. Good luck figuring that out without the wiki. It used to be you’d punch a tree and then start mining. There was a lot less stuff to figure out. Sure, you needed to look up the optimal layer for diamonds if you wanted to optimize, but it wasn’t required. Recipes you also used to have to look up, which was always dumb. Some recipes make sense, but especially as the game grew there’s no way you could try all the combinations of items to figure out recipes. I still think it still works the same in vanilla somehow, but I always install a mod for that, especially since it’s so much worse now and mods multiply it.